Enterprise collaboration platform is growing and companies are ready to take full advantage of this “new” technology. Though collaboration tool has been around since a decade but recently most of the companies have started using it making it a sort of “new” and cool technology. The recent reports suggest that enterprise collaboration software is indeed seeing tractions among companies.
With the increasing effect of consumerization of Information technology enterprise collaboration software with an added layer of social feature is poised for exponential growth. The reports from world’s leading market research organization like IDC, Gartner, Forrester echoes the market sentiment of growth for this technology. Despite of showing such a growth potential many companies in India is reluctant to implement in their organization. Though this trend is changing but still there is no acceleration in its implementation. Unlike other software enterprise collaboration tools heavily rely on use of employees working in the organization to make it really successful. Here we will see how companies can use enterprise collaboration software to make their work easy and accelerate their success in this competitive world.
1. Change Mindset – Enterprise collaboration is not a Facebook
Just looking at the activity stream, profile creation or image and video upload feature enterprise collaboration platform does not become a facebook. The point in adding this feature is make the enterprise software a more social among the users so that they can take active part in the company’s various activities.
2. Don’t Preach - Lead by example
Just implementing an enterprise collaboration tool will not make it a runaway success. Enterprise collaboration tools are more of a transformational product rather a technology product. More or less every vendor offers similar features but many do have their own USP. When top management actively uses this platform they set an example for their counterparts and employees in the organization. This creates a dominion effect and employees start to use it regularly. The long term benefit of enterprise collaboration tool can only be seen when the whole organization uses it actively.
3. Choose the product based on your needs and not features
With many collaborative software vendor mushrooming everyday it is important that before making the purchase you analyze what are your requirements and does the product satisfies all those. Going after product which is stuffed with some pristine features does not serve the purpose. It will also save you money, time and effort.
4. Don’t look for short-term benefits
Every CIO has this in his mind about the ROI about the product or services he purchases. But it is important to note that just like other intangible software products, enterprise collaboration does not yield you short term benefits, nevertheless you can see some of them in your companies with its active use like, saving time on lengthy processes, improve collaborative environment, increased knowledge sharing etc. Long term benefits may include a cultural change, innovation, improved revenue and profits.
5. Encourage and Learn
It is important for top-management to encourage everyone in the organization to use enterprise collaboration tools. This will increase the confidence of the employees and help more and more people to use the platform and get the benefits out of it. Also continuous learning and improvement is the aspect of enterprise collaboration tools where you can offer new methods on how to use enterprise collaboration tools. It is seen that companies those who successfully use the collaboration tools perform far better than those who do not.
